Ugly Software (like Blackboard) Gives Education a Bad Name

If something is repeatedly happening (restaurants have bad sites, enterprise software is crap, education software is ugly..), it might be worth digging a little deeper and understanding why. If something is perplexingly broken, there is slightly harder to find reason why. That's why it's perplexing.<p>Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.<p>If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.<p>Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.

Sungard is another offender in this sphere. Huge company, crappy software (the Sony Root-kit) and incompetent, litigious management.<p>When I was an undergrad I found a CSRF vulnerability in their product Banner. I tried contacting SungardHE on my own, but couldn't contact a human being, so I brought it to the attention of the IT dept at my university. They asked me to prepare a demo against their dev server. After seeing the demo, IT brought this to the attention of Sungard.<p>A day or two later, someone at Sungard called the school's general counsel and demanded that they bring charges against me for some ambiguously defined computer crime. A professor I was working for went to bat for me and smoothed things over.<p>We reached an agreement where I wouldn't disclose until they had distributed a patch and they would acknowledge me for the fix. They reneged on their end of the deal, so I released to Bugtraq.<p>I'm all for someone eating their lunch.

Ugly[0] companies (like Blackboard) give software a bad name<p>[0] I'm referring not just to the software they produce, but the arrogant mentality and litigious nature of the company as a whole

Not sure how true that really is in Blackboard's market, given their use of software patents to attack competition.<p>As far as getting good software into education, you're fighting both your competition and the establishment. Not an enviable position. Most of my experiences with how UK schools procure their IT equipment and software have reminded me of 'enterprisey' corporations and the disconnect between purchasers and buyers. (At least their excuse is they have neither enough time or money to do a good job.)

I recently graduated from undergrad. While I was there, my alma mater switched from Blackboard to Moodle. A few of the 'bleeding edge' professors started experimenting with Moodle's features, but most used it exactly the same as Blackboard (post the syllabus, post weekly assignments if they weren't already on the syllabus).<p>Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.<p>With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.

There's a strong team behind a new competitor to Blackbord, <a href="http://www.instructure.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.instructure.com/</a>.<p>Decent article about them: <a href="http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new-lms-entrant/" rel="nofollow">http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new-lms-entrant/</a>

Moodle seems to do the basic job if you don't want to deal with Blackboard.

There was a question recently posted (by me - hope it's not a problem I'm bringing it up again): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011805" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011805</a><p>which gives a lot of insight into the issue.<p>I'm currently a student and my university uses BlackBoard. The software is simply awful. Every professor chooses a different ugly template for their own course, so there is no consistency. In my university, the more able professors have started making their own websites to put up lecture notes, tutorials and grades.<p>Even the new updates are just a skin of their poorly designed product. No new functionality is added(or even improved), but instead it's just a 'prettier version' of the older system. And the amounts they charge universities for such tools is crazy.<p>But as someone already mentioned, they have a monopoly in the education sector, and they make it really difficult for universities to switch to an alternative tool [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dowling.edu/mydowling/tech/bbdocs/bb-exp.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dowling.edu/mydowling/tech/bbdocs/bb-exp.html</a>

An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu (<a href="http://eduglu.com/" rel="nofollow">http://eduglu.com/</a>). It's both an opensource project and start-up. Having followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation forward.

Universities should stop using Blackboard. They tried to use a software patent to prevent competitors from implementing "roles" (otherwise known as user groups).<p>Eben Moglen even gave a keynote on this: <a href="https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen" rel="nofollow">https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+-...</a><p>The keynote was followed by an open discussion with Blackboard's lawyer: <a href="https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small" rel="nofollow">https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime...</a><p>As Eben Moglen put it: "Preventing people from learning how things work is the opposite of education."

Having only Blackboard as a delivery mechanism in South Africa (TUT) was really detrimental. Everything is a service call or a call out. I eventually (after 2 semesters) just used my own Moodle setups.

Most faculty just want a simple place to put course documents and announcements and Blackboard (and Moodle for that matter) are just overkill for most of them. The main reason it seems is that they're purchased by committees who make decisions by checking off boxes on a large feature list, where it doesn't seem to matter if anyone actually uses those features. You can tell how bad it's gotten since many faculty are already doing their own thing, i.e. using Google groups, pbwiki or making their own simple websites.<p>Due to my frustration using WebCT for classes I TA'd as a graduate student, I recently partnered with another student to build a simple alternative in Django. Check it out at <a href="http://thiscourse.com" rel="nofollow">http://thiscourse.com</a> It's designed to provide access to the crucial features as quickly as possible. We're always interested in getting feedback and have had a few classes use it successfully so far.

I have just visited the Blackboard web site. After following many links and viewing about 20 pages there, I have no idea what it actually does, what is required to run it, and what it costs.<p>I don't understand why companies make such useless web sites.

The more cognitive energy students spend on figuring out how to use systems stops them from focusing the course content. The bigger barrier to participation the less participation there will be. Course management systems like blackboard, desire2learn, etc are rarely if evaluated on user-centered principals of design and usability. Decisions are made based on business factors like cost, licensing, etc. Features are only evaluated in an abstract sense. I guess it is this way with many large organizations.

As a student still in college, I cannot stand blackboard. I cringe every time I need to use it because it is ugly, slow, confusing and often does not work correctly.<p>Most professors prefer not to use it but are forced to by the College since they are paying for BB services.<p>I personally feel the education sector is a wide open game, create something that will increase learning potential and bring more value to a students degree and you will have success.

Horrible software, us UofToronto students have to use this despite having had our own univ server CCNet in the past that worked flawlessly and blazingly fast.

Anybody remember Peoplesoft?<p>Ugh...

My school used eCollege a Blackboard competitor. Let me tell you, it is just as bad.

Are we talking about Blackboard, the company founded by Cal students?

Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad, and the iPad app is really nice. It's just any site that tells you that you just failed a quiz is bad by association.

In my school district, we have been using Blackboard Learn for as long as I can remember. According to Wikpedia, it's the "<i>next generation learning management system</i>". In essence, it provides a way for teachers to interact with students, as well as for students to interact among themselves. Posting grades, class announcements, and homework assignments are only a few of the things teachers can do through the site. Students can view all of this information, as well as form groups, run blogs, use calendars, and create discussion boards.<p>My point is that Blackboard is not a piece of ugly software. It is fully functional and has a nice and intuitive design to it. The article says that:<p><pre><code> Badly designed software with poor usability goes hand in hand with general appeal </code></pre> However, this software is not badly designed as it does what it is supposed to do (and more), and the usability is perfectly fine. Ironically, our district has switched to another piece of software to replace Blackboard's, but only because of the teacher's belief that it offered too many features.<p>I think that the author of this post should rethink Blackboard.